Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.

If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.

Much of southern Louisiana is no longer dry land.

Devils Hole pupfish, or, scientifically speaking, Cyprinodon diabolis.

The conditions in the tank are meant to mimic nature as closely as possible, except in the one way that leaves the actual Devils Hole so vulnerable.

The simulacrum lies beyond the reach of human disruption because it’s totally human.

“What good are pupfish?” they’d demand.

“What good are you?” Pister would respond.

An atoll, Darwin observed, was a kind of a monument to a lost island, “raised by myriads of tiny architects.”

“We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it…We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.”

“Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something. Sometimes it is the other way around.”

In 1776, the first year Watt marketed his invention, humans emitted some fifteen million tons of CO2. By 1800, that figure had risen to thirty million tons. By 1850 it had increased to two hundred million tons a year and by 1900 to almost two billion. Now, the figure is close to forty billion tons annually.

At the peak of the lockdown, in April, global CO2 emissions were down an estimated seventeen percent compared with the comparable period the previous year.

But if a fleet of SAILs looks like a quick, cut-rate solution, that’s primarily because it isn’t a solution.

“The timescale of the climate system is centuries to tens of thousands of years. If we stop CO2 emissions tomorrow, which, of course, is impossible, it’s still going to warm at least for centuries, because the ocean hasn’t equilibrated.

“It’s the unintended consequences,” she said. “You think you’re doing the right thing. From what you know of the natural world, it should work. But then you do it and it completely backfires and something else happens.”

“The real world of climate change is that we’re up against it,” Schrag responded. “Geoengineering is not something to do lightly. The reason we’re thinking about it is because the real world has dealt us a shitty hand.”

“We dealt it ourselves,” Macfarlane said.

The most recent ice age, known in the United States as the Wisconsin, began roughly a hundred and ten thousand years ago.

The temperature swings became known, after Dansgaard and a Swiss colleague, Hans Oeschger, as Dansgaard–Oeschger events.

Over the last hundred and ten thousand years, the only period as stable as our own is our own.

Then comes the present interglacial—ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture.

Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn’t finish the book.

First you speed up an ice stream; then you try to slow it down by erecting a three-hundred-foot-tall, three-mile-long concrete-topped embankment.

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.